Three RADIUS Solutions for Your Small Business Network

A RADIUS server can add industrial-strength security to your small business network, but a lot of RADIUS solutions involve industrial-strength expense, too. Here are three inexpensive RADIUS servers -- one costing under $150.

A RADIUS server can add industrial-strength security to your small business network, but a lot of RADIUS solutions involve industrial-strength expense, too. In this Practically Networked article, three feature-packed RADIUS solutions are reviewed, one of them coming in at under $150.

RADIUS servers support the authentication of millions of users to ISPs and networks every day. Small and medium sized businesses might also require RADIUS /AAA for wireless 802.1X security or VPN connections. Here we'll review three different servers smaller organizations might consider.

Periodik Labs offers a RADIUS server for both Windows and Mac OS X, starting at $750.00. It can run on the legacy and latest operating systems: Windows 2000 to Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 and Mac OS X 10.3.9 to 10.6. It requires 20 MB of disk space and 128 MB of RAM.

It supports all the latest Wi-Fi authentication protocols: PEAP , EAP-TLS, LEAP , EAP-TTLS, and EAP-FAST. Additionally, it supports other basic RADIUS protocols, such as PAP and CHAP .

The Elektron RADIUS Server supports many databases for storing and retrieving the user account information: